The reason why the media has been so intent on dragging extraneous, personally damaging information into the national debate is because they are now afraid of their own creation; Donald Trump. Let’s not forget that up until this point, Trump’s campaign has been largely fueled by headline-grabbing sound-bites that the media was almost all too willing to lap up with the frenzied gusto of starving curs. They in fact have now become so expectant of feeding off controversial statements generated by the candidates, that they have completely abandoned their roles as watchdogs guarding the nation’s storehouse of facts, integrity, truth and transparency.

The print media in particular have all but abandoned investigative reporting and profiling the lives and public records of the candidates; gone is the long form journalism of the past. And the television media no longer even make the pretense of doing in-depth interviews, relying solely on sound-bites and ‘gotcha’ moments among a growing cacophony of pundits with a bewildering set of agendas and vested interests. Nixon administration vice-president Spiro Agnew’s words describing the media as ‘nattering nabobs’ would be even more applicable to today’s media than it was at the time he said it. In fact, if he were a fixture on today’s political scene, he probably wouldn’t be in the running for VP, but in fact the CEO of a media start-up called “Natter”, which enables pundits to instantly publish short, pithy attacks on political candidates. Oh wait, I forgot; we already have that and it’s called Twitter. But you get the point – Agnew’s ‘natter’ is today’s ‘tweet.’